Existential Value and Risk Modeling

According to reactionaries, like Forbes, the natural tendency to dysfunctional psychopathy usefully operationalizes with capitalism to save us from ourselves.

A psychopathic personality is, objectively (i.e., reason free of moral sentiment), a survival mechanism. By nature, a system evolves modeled to minimize the risk of loss by maximizing productivity (expanding the pie as Paul Ryan explains). Instead of looting ourselves back into feudalism, the free-market mechanism operationalizes selfishness (greed) with the productive capacity necessary for us all to be self-determined by natural right, and survive.

Yes, as Forbes points out, we are all functionally psychopathic and we naturally compete in the marketplace to peacefully resolve conflict in the alpha dimension. As long as we maintain a free-market in which risk is directed into an on-demand ontology there is little question as to whether the reward is legitimately earned. This legitimacy of the risk proportion, reactionaries explain, is not derived from a utopian vision--it is not to be measured against a world of ideas, for example, in which there is a formless, and thus unmeasurable, reality. Objective reality is not a product of pure mathematics but the application of the risk in which the profit margin empirically measures the reward legitimately derived from the inherent risk.

(Think of the ontology this way. Let's say you go bowling. The objective is to knock down the pins and the score empirically values, or confirms, the capacity for achieving the objective. While you are determined to knock down the pins if you want to play the game, you do not perceive that the pins are causing you to throw the ball although that is the objective. The pins are not pulling the ball to the pins. You are throwing the ball at the pins by objective.

Despite the action of throwing the ball with teleological determination, the objective result--the ontology--is the pins being knocked down. Ontologically, you can then say the pins are pulling the ball to the objective.

The objective reality depends on the existence of the pins, and achieving the objective--the empirical measure of success--depends on how they are arranged, or organized, to most effectively knock them down.

Organizing the pins is critical for determining the level of success, which will change over time to minimize the risk of loss. To keep the risk the same for everyone requires governance that Romney and Ryan, for example, identify as the problem, not the solution.

Bowling is a pretty simple game, as Forbes points out, until the pins are reorganized to deontologize the risk.

Plato and Aristotle said the deontology derives from the perfect world of ideas. While you have the idea of what the perfect game looks like, with the empirical value of 300, the probability you will attain it is slim unless, of course, you can reorganize the pins to maximize the probable outcome. By manipulating the probability of the risk you can at least minimize the probability someone else will win driven by the common purpose of attaining the perfect score. This common identity existing in zero-sum is from whence the risk is derived, and because we cannot all share in the reward we have the ontology of limited supply against unlimited demand.

To deontologize the risk, Romney and Ryan, for example, pledge to increase the number of pins, and balls to knock them down, by reorganizing the supply we have now so that the wealthy have a disproportionate supply relative to their numbers. In order to gain more balls and pins it is necessary to give up some of the balls and pins you have now to those who already have half the supply in their possession. Even though the numbers don't add up in the world of pure mathematics so that everyone has a chance at the perfect game, the world of pure mathematics does not exist in the real world of objective reality, which requires the secret knowledge of elite power and authority to properly identify with it.

The real-world reorganization that Romney and Ryan propose, despite any supply that may be added, is a zero-sum redistribution of the reward. By application of the exclusive knowledge--the technical expertise--the rest of us can only remotely comprehend, the elite organize the risk into what only appears, they claim, to be a zero-sum detriment. The expected value occurs in late order, but because those that do not properly identify with objective reality want to avoid the risk of failed expectations now, at present value, the result is, foolishly, the failure to be avoided.)

To manage risk is to purposefully derive reward from integral value, and this value, according to reactionaries, is produced and consumed by organizing the marketplace to efficiently manage risk by avoiding it. (When Mitt Romney avoids taxation with secret accounts, the risk is not reduced. The probability it will occur is shifted to the future, currently taking the form of a huge budget deficit that demands taxation, and remember, production and consumption on-demand is a risk ontology managed with purpose using organizational technologies--like RTV's, dark markets, and secret accounts--derived to fit that purpose. Once derived, these technologies dominate our objective reality. Technology pulls us into a regime that does not fit the objective, becoming what the materialist philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, for example, described as the "Leviathan." A big, self-determined ontology presents--manifesting the fully assumed risk of loss--as the risk to be avoided, which obtains in the reactionary language we hear today like, "government is the problem and not the solution.") The people best able to avoid risk are those with the character to be free enterprising, entrepreneurial, and self-determined, naturally organizing an economy with technological advancements (economies of scale, for example) that objectively identify with (or model) their self-interest.

(Remember that according to efficient-markets theory, firms achieve an economy-of-scale because nature dictates it. According to Nobel Prize economists, for example, with mathematical proofs utilizing the statistical analysis of game theory, markets naturally reduce to just a few firms to not only produce the cheapest product sold at the highest possible price, but to control the rate of innovation. Both values exist to resist the declining rate of profit, but efficient-market theorists do not readily admit to that because the natural ontology, they argue, is to resist risk in priority by organizing to maximize the profit. So you see how the bowling game analogy works here: capitalists do not greedily act to knock down all the pins, the pins draw them into the act of knocking them down with increasing efficiency to resist the fully assumed risk of loss.

An economy-of-scale controls the rate of substitution. So, for example, when Exxon-Mobil gets billions in subsidies, it is resisting the rate at which its firm competitively fails. In other words, the market that Forbes and prize-winning economists say is necessary to attain the efficiency of so-called free-market economics is not a free market at all. The free-market legitimacy that by natural right converts the consolidation of capital into earned income, wealth, and power does not, in objective reality, exist because it is naturally inefficient.

According to efficient-markets theory, which the Obama administration and its current opponent for that office both support, an economy-of-scale does not resist innovation. Instead, it creates more value than would otherwise exist because it is more able to consolidate the capital necessary to take big risks.

Ouch! Don't we all know what that means! Allowing industry and markets to consolidate to achieve economy-of-scale efficiency models the risk proportion that a free market is systematically--safely and soundly--supposed to avoid with the legitimate, unquestionable objectivity of collective moral authority "We" call government by consent!

A marketplace freed of consolidation and protected by government authority--exactly what reactionaries like Forbes argue against--allows for maximum self-determination at the lowest possible cost. Isn't that the existential value "We the People" are looking for?)

What derives from the risk is existential value (what psychologists call "self-concept"). The best and the brightest are not the most highly rewarded because they are criminal psychopaths, Wall Street explains, but because they are realists, objectively operating without the utopian visions that always prove to be dystopically tyrannical and unproductive with the force and legitimacy of moral authority.

Selfishness is not a character flaw that condemns us to dystopia. It is a character trait that successfully reproduces in a free market to conserve our natural existence against the odds--the fully assumed risk of loss.

(Keep in mind that the character trait argument is plausible but not entirely convincing. Forbes suggests this hypothesis in his book, "The Freedom Manifesto," but it is the typical, reactionary, exculpation of the risk-reward distribution that argues all the bad things people have to say about people like him ignore objective reality. Wall Street behaves the way it does, reactionaries argue, because of the "human condition"--naturally greedy and thus functionally productive, which is more a virtue than a vice.

Going back to the bowling game analogy, if capitalists didn't consolidate the pins, and the balls you need to knock them down by objective, then you wouldn't be willing to produce more pins and balls so that everybody can play the game. The logic here is that the more playing the game is deprived, the more the game is played...and if you can demonstrate that bunch of $#&*@! mathematically, then you SHOULD win the Nobel Prize!)

Being selfish is integral to the reward. Even with the application of a utopian vision we can be sure that satisfaction of the self will be derived to form a divisible distribution at the top in the name of maintaining the moral imperative of a peaceful and prosperous existence at the base--what Hobbes described as a "Leviathan" that fully assumes the risk of loss and transforms it into a fractal extension of a fully functional psychopathy.

What philosophers of the risk proportion, like Steve Forbes, don't say is that the extension of the rents he proposes, by limiting the money supply to a classical, economic proportion, builds the Leviathan. It builds up the body politic to resist contagion and support the model of equilibrium--the status quo. The body eventually loses its resistance and support breaks down with the risk being clearly indicated, and preventable in a crisis proportion, if the modeling allows for its perception. If the indicators are misread or ignored the result will be catastrophic illness for the body politic, reacting with the delusion of immortality that only serves to hasten its demise.

Right-wing reactionaries refer to the risk modeling of Hobbes (a 17th Century political philosopher) because it suggests the natural right to revolt against a system that does not apply the self-interest of the people (a system with a divine-right legitimacy, for example, not unlike what we have today when reactionaries describe the right to property adversely possessed, or earned, in the marketplace being derived from nature or divine providence). Hobbes was essentially describing a fully assumed risk of loss: risk-value integral to our natural existence.

Reactionary philosophers like Forbes want to disprove the existential value of utopian socialism (dialectical materialism) in particular. Using Aristotelian logic, like Ayn Rand (and prize-winning economists), he argues the integral value of utililizing a fully functional psychopathy to avoid the fully dysfunctional psychopathy we have now derived from neo-classical risk modeling.

Aristotelian logic like Rand uses, despite claiming to be objective, is not an empirically based analysis. Although the method she and Forbes use to describe objective reality and our true, existential identity is logically conditioned, it models an a' priori, objective identity. If we deviate from the norm of the working model, as Aristotle explains, we deviate from objective reality and the identity of our natural existence. We start living in a delusional, utopian, dream world that does not rationally model objective reality.

According to Forbes, for example, the free market (free enterprise without government intervention) mechanically models the reality of our existence. The results are not an a' priori condition but the empirical proof of our natural condition a' posteriori.

Free enterprise forms a morally sound, force-majeure ontology--a freely enterprised system of rewards and deprivations which, of course, exculpates the risk Forbes says is earned and not plundered. Since everyone is equally free to earn (or plunder), the results are logically legitimate--the results are ontological (objectively rational, like the pins drawing the ball to knock them down), which means there is no usurpation of power (no moral, gamma-risk dimension that I argue, for example, to be the ontology at work) and, thus, no need for government intervention.

The outcomes are purely logical, conditioned on the capacity to win in the marketplace by, for example, modeling risk so that it perpetually produces debt and default force-majeure. We are then "forced" to make the market more efficient to control the risk proportion--it is a logical condition, which is then mathematically modeled (like Tycho Brahe's retrograde motion) to validate the objective reality of the model with pure, irrefutable logic.

Pure logic, despite being irrefutably conditional--not deviating from the normative model that is morally imperative--is always subject to empirical confirmation, however, as Thomas Hobbes was apt to point out, by natural right.

The more we want to be without risk, as Hobbes suggested, for example, the more probable it is we will discover what we do not want to be.

After the latest Jackson Hole summit, the Fed chair says we have avoided being in a deflationary spiral. The Hamiltonian model is working to keep the global economy liquid despite tremendous pressure to liquidate the increasing debt burden.

Risk has been modeled to produce an existential value that depends on always being on the brink of default to keep us productive instead of poor and dependent on the king (government). Instead we are dependent on demand in the open market. Should we not question, however, the value of always being on the verge of being what we do not want to be, always acting to avoid crises by converting equity into debt on demand.

(Remember, the Fed is not exactly an organ of government, but is an organ of self-governance. Its assets are private property, which means, by natural right, unlike the king, it is not sovereign wealth to be legitimately held to public account--it is not retributively valued--as Hobbes suggests. Fed assets are managed in secret accounts, holding value in reserve, turning risk on or off as its owners see fit to govern demand through its Open Market Committee.)

Not only do we have a central banking system that relies on debt to avoid detriment but we have a binomial, political alternative that relies on debt as well. Voters are determined to identify the problem as the solution. The identity of the risk is conserved so that, by avoiding the probability of the risk, what we are is never defined by who we want to be.

An ambivalent, objective identity is the product of social contract theory, confirmed by Paul Ryan at the 2012, Republican National Convention when he declared, "We will lead and not govern."

Ryan is referring to the conservative sentiment that the republican form of government is more about the application of elite authority by natural right which, if you are one of the chosen few, is what "We" mean by self-governance. The non-elite participate by contract, and when the elite break the contract, which Obama stands accused, the majority rules, as Hobbes suggested, to establish a new contract.

Contrary to Ryan's conceptual model, the Hobbesian choice of our natural existence is government by consent. The more we are led, the more we want to govern. The more we avoid the risk the more likely we are to take the risk and become what we are led to believe we don't want to be. (This ontology of the risk that Hobbes suggests is why we have a binomially structured political system--a Leviathan, a kind of Hobbesian choice, in which the head--the leadership--talks the talk and the body walks the walk no matter what the stakes are.)

Existence is not a derivative, contractual obligation subject to arbitration. That there is meaningful existence only by derivation of the value is a pathogenic conceit suggesting there is no objective reality, only the rule of law and binding arbitration. Existential value does not derive from contract law, which demands government to enforce it, but a natural right integral to the value of the risk that a social contract cannot void.

Hobbes is referring to existential value contained in the organism (the establishment, the Leviathan) that models the risk, which Darwin later referred to as natural selection (an ontology, like the ball being drawn to the pins) that ensures survival of the species. He refers to a natural tendency--a risk ontology--that later becomes the natural right to self-determine, or self-governance, and later, the psychopathy that ensures the productive incentive necessary for the human species to survive against the odds.

To protect us from ourselves requires the rule of law and leadership, Ryan explains, not governance. Risk is not arbitrated on command but arbitraged on demand, freely enterprised so that we can be what we want to be by social contract (by consent), which cannot be determined by government (the Leviathan) lest we be corrupted, as Forbes describes it, being governed by "the collective" rather than led by the best and the brightest selected in the marketplace for their natural competence.

Ryan attributes natural right to nature and God, which gives it the existential value of supreme being (with the power to "create" jobs, for example) meaning that no one has the right to take it away. Objectively, no one can take it away, although people who want to govern try, and so Republicans vow to lead with naturally selected competence in the marketplace and not govern. Ruling by natural right--the right to self-determination--as Ayn Rand argues, is not an idealistic concept of the self, it is objective reality...our objective identity.

Psychopathy, for example, instead of being the measure of what we don't want to be, is a survival mechanism endowed by nature to be nurtured...cultured into a highly productive, economic environment, self-determined, fully functional, preventing us from becoming what we can never be?